John W. Kirklin Is Dead at 86; Innovator in Cardiac Surgery

By JEREMY PEARCE

Published: April 30, 2004

Dr. John W. Kirklin, a cardiovascular surgeon whose refinements of the heart-lung machine in the 1950's helped make open heart surgery safer and more predictable, died on April 21 at his home in Birmingham, Ala. He was 86.

The cause was complications after a fall, said his son, Dr. James K. Kirklin, the director of cardiothoracic transplantation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where the elder Dr. Kirklin long practiced.

Dr. John Kirklin was a researcher, a clinician, an author and an academic administrator. But among his chief contributions was the improvement of the Gibbon heart-lung machine, developed by a Philadelphia physician, John H. Gibbon, to allow a patient's blood to continue circulating even though the heart has been stopped for the sake of the surgery.

At the Mayo Clinic in the 1950's, Dr. Kirklin successfully performed heart operations with the improved machine, which also infuses oxygen as it pumps the blood. With further refinements, the device has become a standard in surgery today. It replaced an earlier and less efficient method at Mayo called cross-circulation, which required a healthy donor, usually a relative, to be connected to a heart patient during surgery.

''It was the clinical application of the heart-lung machine that made John Kirklin one of the world's pioneers in modern heart surgery,'' Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, emeritus chancellor of the Baylor College of Medicine, said yesterday.

Dr. Kirklin is also credited with using the heart-lung technology to study congenital heart problems. Some of his research was later included in the textbook ''Cardiac Surgery,'' which became a standard reference.

John Webster Kirklin was born in Muncie, Ind., and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Minnesota. He received his medical degree from Harvard and served as a captain in the Army.

After training at the University of Pennsylvania, he worked at Children's Hospital in Boston before joining the Mayo Clinic in 1950. He was chairman of the department of surgery there when he left for the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1966. He was surgeon in chief at the university hospital in Birmingham and chairman of the department of surgery before retiring in 1989.

Dr. Kirklin was a longtime editor of The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. He wrote or contributed to 700 academic articles and lectured widely, and his research was recognized with honorary degrees around the world.

The American Heart Association gave him a research achievement award, and he received the Mayo Foundation Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1981.

Dr. Kirklin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine and was a former president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.

In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife of 60 years, Margaret K. Kirklin, and a daughter, Helen W. Kirklin of Gainesville, Fla.

Photo: Dr. John W. Kirklin about 1990. (Photo by University of Alabama at Birmingham)